I’m a moderator of a smaller community. I’m posting quality content multiple times a day, and I posted about it in New Communities. The number of subscribers is low but it’s growing steadily.
Could you please give me some advice on growing this community? I don’t want to spam/flood or come off as rude or weird, but I really believe in it and think it would be useful to many people.
- Work it into the conversation when you’re talking to people elsewhere (I don’t mod any communities but am interested in seeing them grow and this has been the #1 successful tactic)
- Don’t be weird about mentioning it in general. For example, why does this post not say what your community is or have a link for people to follow?
- Don’t just post links that people can click on, think “huh” and then move on. Post questions or other interactive things to draw out lurkers.
- Team up with mods of related communities to maintain a list of “neighbours” that you all pin to make it easy for your users to find more stuff they’re interested in.
- Make sure to respond to anyone who does happen to wander in and leave a post or comment, don’t leave them hanging
- Advertise it on your other social media since presumably you’re hanging around people with the same interests
Thank you, these are excellent tips! Btw here is the community: https://programming.dev/c/auai ([email protected]) - I didn’t want to mention it because I didn’t want my post to sound like cheap self-promotion, but I guess I’m a bit too shy in this regard.
The icon and the cover image are terrible, I’m planning to replace them later.
Remember most people are pretty new here and there’s no way for them to find new communities other than purposefully searching by keyword, or stumbling across a mention somewhere. So if it makes sense in context to give yours a shoutout, do it! If it’s relevant to the conversation you’re not spamming anyone, you’re literally helping them navigate.
Thank you for your advice! I‘m trying to built a bass-related community over at [email protected]. So if you’re reading this and moderate a music related Community, hit me up so we can cross link our Communities and work together!
Good luck! If you’ve got seen it yet, lemmyverse.net is a newer better interface for searching communities so you might be able to use that to find some likely candidates to reach out to.
Didn‘t know about lemmyverse yet, appreciate the tip! Already found some communities I‘ll get in contact with, thanks
Constant work. Such online communities have an exponential growth pattern. So you probably have a certain amount of time after which you double.
This is obviously very apparent when you have 10k subs, and on the next day it is 10,1k. But when you are at 10 subs it can take days for the next to arrive.
Just go on posting and the thing will start to take off. If you stop, or other active members stop the community might die.
Thank you! I will just keep posting every day then.
I think it just takes time. I’m also posting to a community that currently has 7 subscribers (and I think that includes me, haha) but I enjoy posting there since I care about the topic. Growth will come naturally, but I mostly care about exchanging ideas and just general conversation with other fans.
I would say look to other areas that might have some overlap in interest and point them in your direction.
So what is your community and where is it? Advertise it, please. 😊
Make it easy to subscribe if someone is browsing from a different instance. For example, the link to the new communities sub Lemmy, I think if you leave off the protocol (https://) I could browse it via my instance and actually click the subscribe button.
You need to get at least one user on another instance to sub to your community manually. Before you do that, you will only be discoverable by users on the local instance. Once you get that first user, posts in your community will start appearing in “all” on that other instance.
After you get a sub from some other instance, regular posting will help users find you by just seeing posts from your community on their instance, and they can easily click the community name and sub to it.
Aside from this fediverse-specific quirk, @[email protected] already posted some good tips.
Excuse me but may I ask why posts of my community don’t show up on other instances? I made accounts on other instances to manually search it myself, it is discoverable on those instances. However new posts are not.
Do you have at least one sub from that instance (yourself?) if you do, posts should immediately appear in “all” on any connected instances.
There is a bug, where if you mod someone on an outside instance, and they edit anything about the community, it will break federation. I made this mistake with [email protected] and had to talk to the instance admin to have it resolved.
Oh right the instances that I subbed got new posts while the one I didn’t sub is still empty. No modding involved tho.
Oh thanks, this is an important thing to know!
I subbed from lemmy.world.
Thank you!
Cross post to and from similar communities that you think would share users. Specifically use the built in crosspost function.
I made a post about it here: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/217550
I moderate (and was the creator of) [email protected] . In 5 days it now has >4k subscribers. Some tips which helped me are:
- like other people mentioned, work it into a conversation (see what I did above?). It’s especially important to do this on the larger instances where your community ISN’T located, because it doesn’t show up organically for them until the first person subscribes. Find a thread to talk about it on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.itjust.works at minimum. Maybe kbin.social too.
- cross-posting in larger communities might help, since it helps others see that the community exists
- Post a variety of content - memes/stories that others can laugh at, more in-depth discussion threads, etc.
- engage with whoever posts. If someone replies, reply back to them. This helps to drive up engagement and makes the poster feel heard, which encourages more posts.
Without looking at your community that’s the general advice I have.
Also - be prepared to shout into the void for some time. It takes time to gather momentum. You’ll have to be that first person at a party pretending to dance by yourself while having a good time.
Good luck, and thanks for putting in this effort!
Contact mods of related communities to see if you can ‘partner up’, e.g. a sidebar reference to each other.
Remember that fedi is “multi-dimensional” in that we have both community subscriptions and account-to-account follows. When I follow someone from my kbin account, the threads they post and boost start appearing in my “microblog” feed, and that can lead to community discovery. So one way to grow the community is to build microblogging awareness by encouraging follows and boosts, using hashtags, etc. There are already hashtags being used on fedi - actually, let me test something out here and see if I can get it to show up elsewhere:
The result is that (at least so far) both the post and the hashtag has not federated to lemmy.ml, or to my Mastodon accounts. On kbin it appears, but backwards in time to when the topic was first posted.
Be patient and keep going. Promote it in the comments of other posts (when the context allows it. For exaple someone says: “I really like X”. That’s when you reply “hey! I have a community about x! [email protected]”)
